It doesn’t even have to be only for known devices. Once you’ve compromised one device, you can just phone home to have a full powered LLM do your work.

The only real use cases for this would be on closed networks with no internet access, or networks where the traffic is closely monitored. Like, yeah, if I’m trying to hack the CIA, maybe I consider something like this. For the vast majority of devices and networks, this is inefficient and unnecessary.

I mean, it is kind of cool. But vanishingly few organizations have tight enough security that this is worth doing.

Doesn’t mean they’re wrong!

I’ll just upvote the both of you. We all need to be more aware of our echo chambers.

Yeah. Once you spend an afternoon debugging a failing cron job, the 5 minutes needed to write the boilerplate starts to feel pretty ok though.

I’ve never had to spend an afternoon debugging a failing systemd timer in the years since I made the switch.

It’s not. But the systemd timer has more robust logging and monitoring, and much more explicit and readable syntax.

Once you get used to systemd timers, it’s really hard to see why you wouldn’t use them if your system has systemd. Unless writing crontabs by hand makes you feel like a hacker I guess. I’m not even being totally sarcastic about that - there is a fun retro feel to cron.

I think most the serious investors know. But, in a bubble, stock value can keep going up long past the point that makes sense. If you think that’s going to happen, it can make sense to invest even if you think it’s a losing play in the long run.

This should really make the timing more urgent for Anthropic. I was legitimately surprised when they decided to delay the IPO.

Also there’s still a real chance that Anthropic has some real value proposition that I’m not understanding, though I’ve yet to find someone who can make a coherent argument for what that looks like.

Right? This is going to be an interesting story to follow.

On the one hand, they don’t want to IPO right now, probably because they don’t think investors are keen to buy at the price they’re asking.

On the other hand, I don’t really see things getting better for them as long as cheap open-weight models that are almost as good as Anthropic’s exist. As more people figure this out, I think it’s going to get worse not better. So I don’t think they can afford to wait long.

I think it’s important to call out that this isn’t an issue with AI being brilliant at hacking. It’s that these systems are basically totally unsecured, and the main protection is that no one with the technical skill is bothering to try to get access.

This isn’t to say this isn’t a serious problem. We’re moving from a world where you need a trained security expert to spend non-trivial time to get access to these systems to one where anyone with access to an un-restricted agentic LLM can do this trivially and quickly.

As a civilization, we need to start taking security seriously.

GPL (and copyleft generally) gets way more attention than it should. In the wild, MIT and similar permissive licenses are by far the most common. Linux is on GPL, but that may be a historical artifact as much as anything. I don’t know if Linus himself would choose it if he were making the choice today.

The wider FOSS community, in my experience, leans permissive rather than copyleft. The copyleft people are just loud.

EDIT: To be clear, when I say I don’t know what choice Linus would make today, I don’t mean that I’m skeptical he’d choose GPL. I literally just mean that I don’t know. He’s been quite clear that he’s not a principled believer in copyleft, but it does have real advantages for a project like the Linux kernel.

“The outputs of this opt-in vulnerability scanner will be fully model-generated, without human review or triage,” Anthropic explained. “This will enable faster and more frequent scanning, but means that it is possible reports will be incorrect or invalid.”

When I saw the headline, I was wondering about this specifically. This may make this service not super useful.

My experience with AI security reviews is that they’re fantastic at finding faults, but they always find a list of things to complain about. If there are no real/serious faults they’ll start finding things that kind of have the same shape as a security issue, but really aren’t if you dig into them. I’ve regularly had an LLM generate a list of 10-15 issues ranging in severity from “nits” to “critical” where none of them were actual issues.

Periodic reviews seem like they could get annoying really quickly, becoming more of a maintenance burden than a help.

Retractions do happen regularly. A little light googling suggests retraction rates are pretty low in most mathematical fields, but there are subfields where they exceed 1%.

I don’t know if the <0.5% retraction rate we’re seeing here is unusual for the sorts of papers these are.

And that’s kind of my point. I read the article and I still have no idea. I doubt the author of the article knows either. Which makes me think that they had an agenda going into the whole affair.

There are definitely issues with what OpenAI is doing. I’m the last to defend them.

That said, a small correction rate after uploading a bunch of preprints just doesn’t seem like news. An article that headlines with that, but doesn’t even bother to tell us what the normal rate of corrections and withdrawals is for humans really feels like propaganda to me.

I would really like to live in a world where we don’t reward this sort of “journalism” with attention.

I think of Mistral as primarily making models for API use that you can use in all sorts of places. I didn’t even know they had an app. I think the app is probably mostly intended as an easy way to try out the models, not their main business.

Honestly, this is nothing new.

Listening to ChatGPT is a solid improvement over listening to Tucker Carlson.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not good! I don’t exactly trust the Sam Altmans of the world. But this is the same circus, different clowns.

this is all done with custom models by individuals.

This is really important for people to understand.

Powerful open weight models are already out there. Anyone can download them and run them. There is no possibility for government control of AI content without North Korean style internet controls.

Politicians and corporations will absolutely start trying to push for more controls. They will tell you to “think of the children” and they will use this to take power for themselves, knowing full-well that they can’t actually meaningfully prevent this from happening. We need people to understand that the push for control here has nothing to do with morality or protecting anyone.